Eternity

Concepts of eternity have developed in a way that is, as a matter of
fact, closely connected to the development of the concept of God in
Western thought, beginning with ancient Greek philosophers;
particularly to the idea of God's relation to time, the idea of divine
perfection, and the Creator-creature distinction. Eternity as
timelessness, and eternity as everlastingness, have been
distinguished. Following the work of Boethius and Augustine of Hippo
divine timelessness became the dominant view. In more recent times,
those who stress a more anthropomorphic account of God, or God's
immanence within human history, have favored divine
everlastingness. The debate has been sharpened by the use of
McTaggart's distinction between A-series and B-series accounts of
temporal sequence.

The English word ‘eternal’ comes from aeturnus in Latin,
itself a derivation from aevum, an age or time. So
‘eternity’ means everlastingness. However, in the course
of philosophical discussion the idea of everlastingness has been
further refined, and two contrasting concepts can be denoted by it. It
is usual to make the contrast clear by calling one of these
‘eternity’ or ‘atemporality’ and the other
‘sempiternity’ or ‘everlastingness'.

The richest and longest discussions of eternity have been in
connection with the manner of God's life. The loci classici of this
discussion, which makes the contrast between everlastingness and
eternity clearer, and at the same time establishes what came to be the
dominant account of eternity in western philosophy and theology, are
to be found in Book XI of the Confessions of Augustine
(354–430) and Book V of Boethius's (480–c.525) The
Consolation of Philosophy. (The extent to which the platonism of
Philo of Alexandria (c. 25 B.C.–40 A.D.), particularly applied
to the idea of creation (for example, in his De opificio
mundi) was influential is not clear.) However, the styles of
these two thinkers are very different. Boethius presents the idea of
divine eternity as straightforward and relatively problem-free, while
Augustine wrestles with the idea and expresses continual puzzlement
and indeed amazement at the idea of time itself and with it the
contrasting idea of divine eternality.

In Boethius the contrast (which Boethius believes to be a
‘common judgement’) is drawn between timeless
eternity which only God enjoys, and the sempiternity which
(according to Plato) the world itself possesses.

It is the common judgement, then, of all creatures that live by reason
that God is eternal. So let us consider the nature of eternity, for
this will make clear to us both the nature of God and his manner of
knowing. Eternity, then, is the complete, simultaneous and perfect
possession of everlasting life; this will be clear from a comparison
with creatures that exist in time.

…for it is one thing to progress like the world in Plato's
theory through everlasting life, and another thing to have embraced
the whole of everlasting life in one simultaneous present. (Boethius
Consolation, V.VI.)

God has life, so eternity in this sense cannot also be possessed by
abstract ideas or numbers. God's life is ‘at once’,
simultaneous. Boethius invokes this idea in order to resolve the
problem of providence. If God knows beforehand what I shall do then
how can I be free not to do it? His answer is that this problem
dissolves in the face of the fact that God does not know anything
beforehand but has an immediate, atemporal knowledge of all
things.

In Augustine the connection is made between divine eternity and
divine fullness, and of God, existing timelessly, being the cause
of all times.

What times existed which were not brought into being by you? Or how
could they pass if they never had existence? Since, therefore, you are
the cause of all times, if any time existed before you made heaven and
earth, how can anyone say that you abstained from working? (Augustine,
Confessions, XI. xiii (15)).

It is not in time that you precede times. Otherwise you would not
precede all times. In the sublimity of an eternity which is always in
the present, you are before all things past and transcend all things
future, because they are still to
come. (Augustine Confessions XI. xiii (16)).

In you it is not one thing to be and another to live: the supreme
degree of being and the supreme degree of life are one and the same
thing. You are being in a supreme degree and are immutable. In you the
present day has no ending, and yet in you it has its end: ‘all
these things have their being in you’ (Rom.11.36). They would
have no way of passing away unless you set a limit to them. Because
‘your years do not fail’ (Ps.101.28), your years are one
Today. (Augustine Confessions, I. vi (10)),

So, beginning with Augustine and Boethius, many thinkers have held the
view that God exists apart from time, or outside time. He possesses
life all at once. But the expression ‘all at once’ is not
meant to indicate a moment of time, but the absence of temporal
sequence, though not, in the view of some, the absence of duration. So
it is not that God has always existed, for as long as time has
existed, and that he always will exist, but that God does not exist in
time at all. He is apart from his creation, transcendent over
it. Eternalists such as Augustine and Boethius deliberately reject the
idea that God is everlasting, or sempiternal, that for any time
t God exists at that time.

On this view there is a radical and sharp distinction between the
Creator and his creation. Among the marks of the Creator is that he
exists necessarily, and is timeless and changeless, while his creation
is contingent, and its changes are marked by time. Some, such as
Augustine, suggest that God created the universe with time and if time
is what you get when things change, then this seems an attractive
proposal. Time is not a substance or a thing, but a relation between
things, or more exactly a relation between changes in things.

What helps to form the thought that God is timeless (and spaceless) is
the idea, surely a basic intuition of ‘Abrahamic’ theism,
that God has fullness or self-sufficiency or perfection. Part of God's
perfection is that he is changeless; he cannot change for the worse,
and does not need to change for the better. He exists as a complete,
entire unity, together. His existence is not spread out in time or in
space, as the existence of material objects is, but his existence is
all at once.

Those in time are bound by it, in this sense, that they cannot stop
the process of change and therefore of time. They are the subjects of
time, not its masters. In a sense, they are more the masters of space
than they are of time, for they can choose to remain at the same
physical location for a time, but they cannot choose to remain at some
particular time. In this respect the hymn-writer Isaac Watts was
perfectly correct when he compared time to an ‘ever-rolling
stream’ which ‘bears all its sons away’.

Another feature of time is that those who exist in time have lives
which are successive. Their memories are of parts that existed
earlier, present awareness is of that part that exists now, (or
perhaps a short time earlier) and hopes and expectations concern those
parts that exist later. If God is in time in the sort of way that
human beings are in time it follows that he has earlier and later
phases. At any time, a part of his life is earlier than other
parts. On the reasonable supposition that he has always existed there
is a series of parts that is backwardly everlasting. There never was a
time when God was not. Nevertheless it follows from the supposition
that God is in time that there are segments of his life which together
constitute a part of God's life that are presently inaccessible to him
except by memory. And the eternalist will say that such an idea is
incompatible with God's fullness and self-sufficiency. For how could
God be restricted in this way?

As noted, Boethius found the source of the idea of eternity which he
attributes to God in Plato. In the Timaeus (37E6–38A6)
Plato contrasts the eternal forms with the time-bound created world,
the world of mutation and becoming, for time was created along with
the heaven (38B5), meaning at least that time is the measure of
change, and perhaps that it is identical with the movements of the
heavenly bodies, a view later critiqued by Augustine
(Confessions, Book XI. xxiii) Plato's idea of eternity in
the Timaeus seems to be that of timeless duration, for the
Forms endure in the temporal order in which ‘time is the moving
image of eternity’. It is possible to trace a similar idea of
timeless eternity back to Parmenides, though exactly what he means is
the subject of scholarly dispute.

While in some places at least Plato connected the necessary character
of the Forms, including mathematical objects, to eternity, in
Aristotle the connection is between necessity and sempiternity. What
is necessary is what exists for all times. What is contingent is what
at some time might not be. God, being necessary, is
sempiternal. Nevertheless it may be said that the sempiternal is not
bounded by time (in a weaker sense than Plato ascribes to the Forms)
in that what exists sempiternally cannot age. (Physics
221b30) Philo of Alexandria is reckoned to be the first to ascribe
timelessness to God, to the God of the Jewish Scriptures. In Plotinus
(ca. 185–254) timeless eternity and life are for the first time
identified together. Nous is eternal and beyond time, enjoying
duration without succession.

The importance of Augustine and Boethius for developing the idea of
eternality has already been noted. Anselm (c. 1033–1109) presents a
similar view.

Suppose, on the other hand, that it exists as a whole in individual
times severally and distinctly. (A human being, for instance, exists
as a whole yesterday, today and tomorrow.) In this case we should,
properly, say that it was, is and will be. In which case its time-span
is not simultaneously a whole. Rather it is stretched out in parts
through the parts of time. But its time-span is its eternity and its
eternity is precisely itself. The supreme essence, therefore, would be
cut up into parts along the divisions of
time. (Anselm Monologion, Ch. 21)

In the Proslogion Anselm articulates for the first time a
‘grammar’ of the divine powers, what it makes sense to say
of the most perfect being, including that being's timelessness.

It is in the medieval period that discussion of eternity embraces not
only Christian but Jewish and Islamic thinkers, often in controversy
among themselves. In keeping with the sharp line drawn between the
Creator and all that is created, medieval thinkers such as Thomas and
the Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides (1131–1204) (who greatly
influenced Aquinas) thought that God's timeless eternity ought to be
understood primarily in negative terms. For Aquinas God's eternity is
unending, lacking both beginning and end, and an instantaneous whole
lacking successiveness) It is a correlate of divine simplicity, and so
incapable of being defined or fully grasped by a creature. Part of
what it means to say that God is incomprehensible is to say that
though we believe that God is timeless we do not and cannot have a
straightforward understanding of what his timeless life is, of what it
is like to be timeless. For Aquinas also timeless eternity constituted
part of the ‘grammar’ of talking about God. Since God is
eternal it does not make any sense to ask how many years God has
existed, or whether he is growing old, or what will he be doing later
on in the year. And he is immutable: it does not make sense to ask
whether God could change.

Despite differences with Thomas Aquinas regarding the nature of God's
relation to time, Duns Scotus (c.1266–1308) upheld divine
timelessness. In general, it would seem that commitment to divine
simplicity, widespread if not universal in the medieval period,
entails a commitment to divine eternality.

Modern discussion of the notion of eternity in a theological context
has followed the trajectory set by this historical pattern, dividing
itself into (broadly) eternalist and sempiternalist approaches to
understanding God's relation to time. Debate has been sharpened and
clarified by the use of the distinction propounded by J.M.E.
McTaggart (1866–1925) between an A–series view of time,
(in which the temporal series is characterised as if from some point
within it, using temporal indexicals such as ‘tomorrow,
‘now’, ‘then’, ‘past’ and
‘future’) and a B-series view, in which the temporal
series is characterised simply by the ‘earlier than’,
‘later than’, ‘simultaneous with’ relations
between events, from a standpoint that is indifferent to its own
temporal position. (McTaggart, 1908)

Laying aside theological arguments drawn from Scripture, the central
argument for eternalism derives from a consideration of the
implications of divine fullness and perfection.

A number of contemporary thinkers such as Paul Helm, in Eternal
God, and Katherin Rogers, in Perfect Being Theology,
argue that for God, who exists timelessly, the temporal order is a
B-series, all times being equally present to his mind. On the
eternalist view of creation, God creates the universe as a temporally
ordered B-series, according to which every event in that universe is,
tenselessly, either before, after or simultaneous with every other
event in the universe. But God is in no temporal relation to this B
series, not even in the tenseless relation that, according to the B
theory, any event in the universe is to any other event in it.

How does thinking of time as a B-series help in our understanding of
creation by a timeless God? On that view, as we have seen, each event
is tenselessly related to each other. The Battle of Hastings has a
fixed, tenseless but nonetheless temporal relation with the Battle of
Waterloo. How does this help? By enabling us to think of the temporal
series from a standpoint that is indifferent to any point within it.
From this it is a short step to thinking of God as occupying a
standpoint outside that series, a timeless standpoint that entails a
tenseless relation between all events but which is not entailed by
it.

Some Jewish and Christian writers read off God's eternality from the
requirements of the Commandment forbidding the making and worshipping
of graven images, which imply the falsity of any depiction of God
using materials drawn from any aspect of the creation. (See the
discussion of the variety of Jewish responses to the idea of the
representation of God by artefacts in Moshe Halbertal and Avishai
Margolit,(1992, Ch.2. For a classic Christian response, see John
Calvin, (1960 II.8) More philosophically, God lacks potential, and
cannot fail to exist his existence, nor is there anything about God
that is accidental, or composite, for then God would depend on what is
(logically) prior to him, and would be caused to be, and so not be the
first cause.

A critic may say that such a sharp distinction between the Creator
and the creature does not do justice to the idea that the creation may
bear the character of the Creator and so in some respects resemble him.
It may also be argued that the idea of perfection is a flexible one and
that though it may be reasonable to interpret perfection in Anselmic
fashion, other conceptions of perfection in which God is understood
temporally are not unreasonable.

Certain contemporary writers, such as Eleonore Stump, Norman
Kretzmann, and Brian Leftow, who have defended the idea of divine
timelessness, have sought to modify this stark picture by insisting
that God's timeless eternity has some of the features of temporal
duration. In this they have followed an important strand in the
tradition going back to Boethius.

However it has been argued (e.g. by Sir Anthony Kenny and Richard
Swinburne) that for all its distinguished theological pedigree
eternalism is straightforwardly incoherent. For if God exists all at
once, then he exists simultaneously with all the events that occur in
the universe. What else does the denial that God has a past and a
future mean but that everything is present at the same moment to God?
Kenny claims that on the eternalist view

my typing of this paper is simultaneous with the whole of eternity.
Again, on this view, the great fire of Rome is simultaneous with the
whole of eternity. Therefore, while I type these very words, Nero
fiddles heartlessly on. (Kenny, 1979, 38–9)

Whatever else we may think we know about time and eternity we know
that if one event is later than another then they cannot both
occur at the same time.

In an effort to respond to Kenny-type claims that eternal existence is
incoherent, and to do justice to Boethius' (and others') idea that
God's eternity has duration, albeit a duration that is nonsequential,
Stump and Kretzmann (1981) have constructed the notion of
ET-simultaneity, a simultaneity that may exist between what is
temporal and what is eternal, or more exactly between an eternal
reference frame and a temporal reference frame. On this view, for
someone occupying an eternal reference frame two temporal events at
different times can both be present, being ET-simultaneous, while not
being simultaneous with each other.

But the introduction of ET-simultaneity seems entirely ad hoc,
(Swinburne, 1994, 248–9) and the reason for introducing it seems to be
based on a confusion. For if divine timelessness is a duration, or has
essential durational aspects, then it makes sense to ask duration-type
questions of the divine life, and the very purpose of, or one central
purpose, of introducing the idea of divine timelessness must be
abandoned. Further, it is not at all clear what is safeguarded by
insisting on God's eternality being durational provided that it is
understood that he has created whatever exists in time and has unique
access to it in virtue of this fact.

However, constructing a hybrid concept, ET-simultaneity, is also
unnecessary. For Kenny's objection rests upon a misunderstanding. The
idea of divine timelessness is only incoherent in this sense if it is
supposed that timeless eternity is a kind of time, having a kind of
eternal duration, a duration which could be simultaneous with some
event occurring in truly temporal time. But there is no compelling
reason to think that timeless eternity is a kind of time, or that it
has aspects of duration, as will be seen. To say that everything is
present to God is not to suppose that everything is temporally present
to God, that God has an experience of everything happening at
once.

Another view, which combines features of both B-series and A-series
views of the temporal series, though not to produce a 'hybrid' view,
is noted by Katherin Rogers. In discussing Anselm's view on divine
eternity, she argues that it is necessary to distinguish between the
divine, timelessly eternal perspective, and the human temporal,
perspective. (Rogers, 2008, 181f). From the divine perspective
everything is simply 'there',and so, as on the B-series view, no event
is nearer in time than anything else. By contrast, human actions must
necessarily be guided by reference to the past, present or the future
time, and so the indexicality of the A-series view of time is
necessary. Such indexicality has a pragmatic or instrumental
justification, enabling human beings to locate themselves in the
temporal series and so to act effectively.

Temporalist views largely rest on the supposed adverse consequences of
eternalism, though some theological views e.g. process thought, or
Hegelian historicism, must reject eternalism as a matter of
theological definition. Temporalism regards God as existing in a
temporal sequences having the characteristics of an A-series, God
being situated at a particular moment in time, the present, and having
a past and a future. However, temporalism is compatible with a range
of A-series views. For example, a temporalist may hold that only the
present is real, or that past and present are each real, though it
would be less common to hold that past, present and future are all
equally real. Several philosophical arguments for temporalism may be
identified.

First, that eternalism depends upon a demonstrably false view of
time, the B-series view. Were it the case that it could be demonstrated
that the A-series view is the true account, then this would severely
handicap, if not provide a refutation of, eternalism. But the nature of
time is a matter of a long-standing and inconclusive debate.

Second, that eternalism portrays a God who is ‘lifeless’
(Swinburne, 1977, Ch.12), “If we are to characterize God at all,
we must say that He is personal, and if personal then temporal, and if
temporal then in some sense in time, not outside it” (Lucas,
1989, 213). A God who is living must be affectable by the goings-on
of the temporal universe, and so be in time. But a God who creates and
sustains the universe can hardly be described in this way.

Third, some hold that nothing that existed outside of time could be
the cause of temporal changes, and therefore, since God is a causal
agent who brings about changes in the world, he must be in time.
This is the view of William Lane Craig who says

Imagine God existing changelessly alone without creation, with a
changeless and eternal determination to create a temporal world. Since
God is omnipotent, his will is done, and a temporal world begins to
exist…. Once time begins at the moment of creation, God either
becomes temporal in virtue of his real, causal relation to time and
the world or else he exists as timelessly with creation as he does
sans creation. But this second alternative seems quite impossible. At
the first moment of time, God stands in a new relation in which he did
not stand before…this is a real, causal relation which is at
that moment new to God and which he does not have in the state of
existing sans creation. (Craig, 1998, 222)

Craig argues against the idea of divine timelessness on the grounds
that, since the creation is contingent, God must have relations with his
creation that he would not have had had there been no creation. As
Craig understands matters there are two alternatives. One is that at
the moment of creation, God becomes temporal in virtue of coming to
possess a real, causal relation to his creation of the world, a
relation that previously he did not have. Alternatively, God exists as
timelessly with creation as he does sans creation. But, says
Craig, this second alternative seems quite impossible. This is
because he believes that it is impossible for what is timelessly
eternal to bring about temporal changes.

The chief problem with this hybrid view is over the way in which the
argument is set up, the coming into existence of the world being
represented as an A-series temporal event for God. Craig has the idea
that it is possible that God exists in a timelessly eternal fashion
and then enters time upon creating a temporal universe. But this
seems confused. There can be no temporal ‘and then’ for a
timelessly eternal God. Even if the universe is created in time, and
even if a timelessly eternal God eternally creates the universe by
willing a temporal succession of events without changing his will, he
has a timeless relation to each of these.

Another objection to timeless divine eternity is that these ideas, of
God outside time and the universe as created with time, are crude and
pre-scientific. The modern physical view of the universe is that time
and space are linked in fundamental ways. There is therefore no such
thing as absolute time, and the debate as to whether God is in time or
timeless is over an outdated issue. But the theory of relativity is
generally taken to support the idea that the universe is a
4-dimensional space-time block, that time is a matter of perspective
and that an ideal knower outside the universe would observe it
‘all at once’.

Let us suppose that this theory of the relationship between time and
space is the correct view. Even so, this cannot be taken to be a serious
objection to the idea of divine eternality, for the following
reason. We can say that whatever the true scientific view of the
relation between time and space is, such a view is but an account of
some fundamental aspect of created reality. But the very point of
asserting divine timeless eternity is to say something about how God
transcends the creation. His timelessness is one eloquent way of
expressing this transcendence. God transcends the entire space-time
universe, however we are finally to understand this. We may even say
that modern physical theory potentially presents more difficulties for
the temporalist position than it does for divine eternalism.

To many philosophers the most attractive modern reason for holding
to sempiternity is that it alone seems able to provide for the
libertarian freedom of human beings and of the Creator himself.
In the case of Richard Swinburne, for instance, so strong is the
commitment to such freedom that it leads him to tailor his idea of
divine omniscience so that God limits himself with regard to what he
knows about the future, both in order to safeguard the reality of
his own libertarian freedom, and also that of his human creatures.

If the theist is to maintain that there is a ‘perfectly
free’ person, omnipresent, omnipotent, creator of the universe,
who is also ‘omniscient’, he has to understand either
‘perfectly free’ or ‘omniscient’ in more
restricted ways than those which I have outlined. It seems to me
clear that he would prefer a restriction on
‘omniscient’…. I therefore suggest the following
understanding of omniscience. A person P is omniscient at a
time t if and only if he knows of every true proposition
about t or an earlier time that it is true and also he knows of
every true proposition about a time later than t, such that
what it reports is physically necessitated by some cause at t
or earlier, that it is true. (Swinburne, 1977, 175)

Nicholas Wolterstorff is also explicit that God must be in
time in order to be able to interact with free human actions,
though less explicit than Swinburne that God's actions must also be
indeterministically free. He says

Some of God's actions must be understood as a response to the free
actions of human beings—that what God does he sometimes does in
response to what some human being does. I think this is in fact the
case. And I think it follows, given that all human actions are
temporal, that those actions of God which are “response” actions are
temporal as well. (Wolterstorff, 1975, 197)

God's free interactivity with human creatures possessed with
libertarian freedom is a core value which is to be preserved at all
costs in our efforts to think with philosophical responsibility about
the idea of God. As we have noted, however, from Boethius onward there
have been those who have held that eternalism solves the problem of
human libertarian freedom and divine foreknowledge, and in any case
such an argument has no appeal to non-libertarians.

We might interpret the words of Sir Anthony Kenny, discussed
earlier, in a different way, not as providing a straightforward
demonstration of the absurdity of divine timeless eternity, but as
issuing a challenge to anyone who is tempted to uphold the idea of
divine eternality. The challenge is to say clearly what divine timeless
eternity is like. If it does not have elements of temporal
duration, and so does not have the absurd consequences which Kenny
suggests, then what exactly is divine timeless eternity? What is the
life of the timelessly eternal God like? What is God's experience of
the temporal universe like?

As we saw in the case of Aquinas, it is natural and warranted by the
nature of things to exercise a little caution in attempting to speak
about the very nature of God. How could minds fashioned to
function in space and time come to understand the nature of the one
who allegedly exists outside space and time?

It is true that we can gain some positive understanding by the use of
analogies. For instance it has been said that the relation between God
and time is like that between the centre of a circle and its
circumference. The relation of the centre of the circle to one point
on its circumference is exactly similar to its relation to any other
point on it. Another analogy is that between God's eternal vision and
someone at the summit of a hill taking in at a glance what is taking
place beneath her. But the hilltop analogy (which Boethius was the
first to use) has been shown to be, strictly speaking,
unsatisfactory. For the person at the summit is herself in time. And
the idea of God as the centre of a circle with time being represented
by the circumference is also defective because of the temporal order
is linear and not circular. So these analogies remain, as all
analogies do, rather unsatisfactory if offered as explanations. Others
have been much more reserved in the use of analogies, even skeptical
about their usefulness. So Augustine toys with the idea that God's
atemporal knowledge of events in time is like the voice producing a
sequence of sounds as it recites a familiar psalm. But ‘You know
them (viz. the sequence of sounds) in a much more wonderful and much
more mysterious way’. (Augustine Confessions,
XI. xxxi.)

Augustine hints that it is not a reasonable requirement for a
satisfactory articulation of a doctrine such as timeless eternality
that one must be able accurately to describe what it is like to be
timeless. Part of what it means to say that God is incomprehensible,
‘mysterious', is to recognize that even if we say that God is
timeless we do not and cannot have a straightforward understanding of
what his timeless life is, or of what it is like to be timeless.

This article has concentrated on eternity as a metaphysical notion
with two contrasting understandings. But besides this central
metaphysical use there is also a sense in which certain sentences are
timeless. For example, sentences which express necessary truths or
falsehoods, or certain matters which are true by definition or
essential. In saying that copper is a metal, or that the sum of the
internal angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles, there is
no implicit contrast to a time when what is asserted was not true or
false. Here it is best to distinguish between the terms
‘tensed’ and ‘tenseless’, properties of
sentences, and ‘timeless’ and ‘temporal’,
properties of individuals and events